For a long time we've been thinking about ways to contribute more to the community. Naturally we focus on keeping our commercial work buzzing along - it's what keeps the electricity bills paid. At the same time, we've come up with many ideas that we can see value in and that are worth developing. Some of these are components of projects we're working on, that with a little bit of tidying could be released, while others are ideas that would only ever be likely to be released for the good of the community. We're still thinking of exactly what the best approach is for us - but when the idea is fully baked, we're hoping it will be fresh tasting!

Along similar lines, there's been a lot of talk over the weekend about Passenger. It's the Apache module that a lot of people have been waiting for and the initial results are good.

There's a comparison of robustness between Phusion Passenger, Thin, Ebb and Mongrel on Ninh's Weblog and a benchmark between mod_rails, Mongrel and Thin on Hongli's site. There's also a RailsCast on how to use it (currently on the Passenger website itself).

We've taken it for a test drive and it lived up to its promise of being easy to use. The other good thing about it? It's Open Source. As well as that, the guys from Phusion have been slightly fresh thinking and offered people the chance to donate for an 'Enterprise License'. Cynics may say there's nothing new to requesting donations for Open Source work, but the thing I liked about this one is that they've already done all the hard work getting it out there.

Suffice to say, we would like to thank them for the work they've done and hope that they keep coming up with the goodies - we didn't hesitate to donate.